Collection: Adult Non Fiction - Biography

"They called for a break, and Gambon magicked up a cigarette from out of his beard. He and I were often to be found outside the stage door, having 'a breath of fresh air', as we referred to it. There would be painters and plasterers and chippies and sparks, and among them all would be me and Dumb...

A moving and powerful memoir of love and loss in the 1980s Australian literary scene. In 1985 Jacqueline Kent was content with her life. She had a satisfying career as a freelance book editor, and was emerging as a writer. Living and working alone, she relished her independence. But then she met ...

I lost my possessions, my salary, my status, my career, my country. And in that fall, I gained everything. Bhutan is known as the land of Gross National Happiness, a Buddhist Shangri-la hidden in the Himalayas. But in the late 1980s, Bhutan waged a brutal ethnic-cleansing campaign against its cit...

He's the sort of actor who can do "Hamlet" and "Charlie s Angels" in the same year. He shuns managers and agents and once agreed to voice the part of "Garfield" because he mistakenly believed it was a Coen brothers film. Bill Murray's extraordinary career is rich with fascinating anecdotes, contr...

"Nate Bargatze used to be a genius. That is, until the summer after seventh grade when he slipped, fell off a cliff, hit his head on a rock, and "my skull got, like, dented or something." Before this accident, he dreamed of being "an electric engineer, or a doctor that does brain stuff, or a math...

This is a biography of James Frederick (Jim) Bowditch former editor of the Centralian Advocate in Alice Springs and later the Northern Territory News, Darwin. He was also responsible for Editing the Mount Isa Mail for some years. Jim was widely known as a compassionate editor, not afraid to take...

A powerful, moving and uplifting memoir about courage and finding and using your voice, from one of Australia's most captivating personalities: Brooke Blurton."My story is about the one thing that I never went without. Love. Big love, that filled me up and made me feel like there was a future for...

A rock'n'roll memoir of life, death and growing up with the occasional scandal. For a man who has been firmly in the public eye for a decade or more, Matt Preston has been very, very quiet about his past and private life. There are reasons for this. Now, in Big Mouth, Matt opens up for the first ...

The best-known modern Chinese fairy tale is the story of three sisters from Shanghai, who for most of the twentieth century were at the centre of power in China. It was sometimes said that one loved money, one loved power and one loved her country, but there was far more to the Soong sisters than...

This red dirt, it takes a hold of you. The blue skies, the sunsets, the starry nights, the river... Country holds onto you. Then you meet the people. Within one week of living in Wilcannia, I had signed up to stay until the end of the year. When Sarah Donnelley left Sydney to take up a teaching p...